The Kingmaker sd-3

by Brian Haig

  He mumbled, “You are being fool. Why did I not kill you when you were sleeping?”

  It was a reasonable point-unless he was like one of those old western gunfighters who called their victim before they shot. The common perception is they did that out of some heroic sense of fair play. Wrong-it was the sadistic code of the Old West to let the victim have a miserable moment to contemplate his impending death.

  Anyway, I released him from the lock, and he rolled over and sat up and began rotating his head. I stayed coiled, ready to strike. He didn’t say anything for a moment, but regarded me through sullen eyes.

  He eventually said, “I have gotten report on attack an hour ago. We have big problem.”

  “True.” I added, “But not the same problem. Mine is the number two guy in the SVR wants me dead. Yours seems to be how to murder me without causing the fingers to point back at you.”

  He scratched an eyebrow. “This is not true.”

  “No, and Stalin’s not dead, either. He and Elvis are hiding out together at some luxurious resort in Mexico, partying their asses off.”

  He gave me a quizzical look. “Elvis?”

  “It’s an old… oh, forget it.” I fell back onto the bed and wondered what this guy’s game was.

  He insisted, “Major, I did not order this attack, but is big problem for me. I am meeting with you in morning and then you have ambush. Who else knows we have this meeting?”

  “My co-counsel. Only I didn’t tell her till after the ambush.”

  “There are others, though, yes? This must be true.”

  His face did look exceedingly apprehensive, and whatever his angle was, I couldn’t see it. It didn’t mean there wasn’t one-only that I couldn’t see it. An important distinction, that.

  I said, “If it wasn’t you, who tried to kill us?”

  Straightening his clothes, he replied, “Police say they are Chechens. This is why it comes to my desk. Acts of domestic espionage must be reported to Viktor and me immediately.” He paused and then added, “But this is idiotic conclusion. Chechens do not kill Americans.”

  Truly, his response surprised me. Were he trying to deflect blame, the easiest thing would be to say, “Chechens? Most definitely.”

  Arbatov walked around and ruminated a bit, then finally stopped and faced me. “Did Bill talk about information I am giving to him?”

  “No.”

  He got a distracted look. “You know nothing about plot?”

  This was getting surreal, however, I’d seen enough bad spy movies to know exactly how I was expected to respond. So I said, “Plot? What plot?”

  “He tells you nothing?” He studied my face to see if I was being truthful.

  “No, Arbatov, he never told me about any plot.”

  He let loose a large sigh and walked over and stared at the curtain. I said, “Look, maybe you should tell me about this plot thing. If you’re really at risk, and your fate hinges on my client, maybe you should tell me everything.”

  I could see his shoulders quake like he was chuckling, and, okay, so I did sound a bit ridiculous.

  “Please.”

  He remained quiet, so I said, “Okay, so this plot is huge and momentous. And I’m not a professional spy, so you can’t tell me.”

  “I am sorry. I trust Bill and Mary. You, I do not know… or trust.”

  “Well, back to square one then.” I couldn’t resist adding, “And for the record, I don’t trust you either, pal.”

  I climbed off the bed and went to the chair where I’d thrown my uniform and started to get dressed, while he stared at the curtain and mulled his options. He finally spun back around and faced me, shaking his head, but desperation is the mother of all disclosures. He’d come to understand that truthfully and inevitably, he had no other options. The three guys resting in a Moscow morgue had joined us at the hip, a sort of literal version of a shotgun wedding.

  Sounding tentative, he said, “The reason I first meet with Bill was to discuss with him about strange things happening in Soviet Union.”

  I was racing to pull on my pants, since it seemed ridiculous to be standing in my underwear as the deputy head of Russia’s spy agency spilled his guts about some earthshaking plot. Surely, moments like this should be more dignified. I said, “Things like what?”

  “You are knowledgeable about how the Soviet Union came to be ended?”

  “Let me see… I think I recall something in the news about it.”

  He ignored my sarcasm. “You do not wonder how this happens so fast… how my seventy-year-old nation explodes?”

  “No.” I stopped dressing and stared at him. “I figured it was a big, rotten piece of garbage that had no reason to hold together. You build a house on a lousy foundation, sooner or later, it’s going to crash down.”

  “Is too simplistic. Please do not get confused with your moral relativism. Your country expands in same way as Russia does. American armies march westward and conquer Spanish, Mexicans, Indians, Filipinos, Hawaiians. You defeat them, and you absorb them. Russia does this same thing. You have civil war and we have civil war. You have Ku Klux Klan, and negro demonstrations, and Puerto Rican terrorists, and we have separatist splinter groups. Yet, both nations outlive these things, yes?”

  “Your point being?” I asked, not completely buying into his analogies, because frankly there was a world of difference. Well, maybe not a world, but enough to be significant.

  He continued, “Inside one year, my country explodes into pieces. For seventy years, one government, one philosophy, one currency, then suddenly, one nation becomes fifteen. You see no oddity in this? This was not planned, was nobody thinking ahead about this. Suddenly, many, many millions of people are thrown into decades of deprivation and poverty and instability.”

  “Had to happen sooner or later. It was a rotten system.”

  “Major, please, I am not bemoaning loss of Communism. I am not some old apparatchik who misses old glories. I am like scientist, looking for reasons. How can this thing happen so fast? Forget your American prejudices and assumptions.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Was made to happen in this way. Impulses are there, yes, but big assistance was given. A glass statue can be frail, but somebody must knock it off table to make it shatter.”

  “And what? You think we were behind it? Hey, pal, you’ve been reading too many of the brochures the CIA writes about itself.”

  “Your CIA cannot do this… I know this. Was too vast, too knowing. This had to be an internal thing.”

  All very interesting; however, it was time to bring the conversation back on track. I asked, “And this has something to do with why you met Morrison?”

  “Yes. Viktor Yurichenko, my boss, heard my concerns, and he agrees something is propelling our country toward this cataclysm.”

  I instantly found myself taking Arbatov more seriously, because Yurichenko had an incredible reputation, and if they both believed something stank to high heaven, maybe there was a turd in the punch bowl, geopolitically speaking, of course.

  He continued in his earnest tone, “Then Viktor tells me to go look for plotters in trouble spots. I am doing this on pretext of assessing situations, but I am looking really for whoever is intervening in these factions, is prodding them, is organizing demonstrations and exacerbating local political anxieties.”

  “And did you find them?”

  “Was too hidden. But I was becoming even more convinced something was there.”

  “Why?”

  “Was too orchestrated. Someone knowing of our seams and stresses was tugging out stitches. You are knowledgeable about chaos theory, yes? Even in most frantic events there must be patterns, logical progressions, but to find these progressions, separate forces must be slowed and studied.”

  “Okay, so?”

  He was becoming animated, and clearly agitated, but whether from passion or frustration I couldn’t tell. He said, “This was our problem. Was happening too fast… overpowering Gorbache
v and his government, avalanches of protests, and local political decisions, and criminal acts, and even revolutions. Everywhere this is happening, fires in every corner. There has to be some trigger, yes? There was too much synchronicity, too much unapparent coordination.”

  “Unapparent coordination?”

  “Yes… was made to appear uncoordinated.” Realizing he was a little over my head, he explained, “Imagine you are cancer researcher and twenty children from one small village get cancer. You search for similarities in children’s habits, what foods they eat, what liquids they drink… nothing can be found. Still, you are knowing something must be there, some force connecting these diseases.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then there is Yeltsin.”

  “Right, then there was Yeltsin. What about him?”

  “You never became curious how this secretary of one city was able to overturn entire political establishment of our Soviet nation? In your country, this would be like your New York City mayor seizing your government, tearing up your Constitution, burning your Bill of Rights, and inventing new government. Except under Soviet system secretaries were even less powerful, less important than your American mayors. How was this possible?”

  “Because your people wanted freedom?” I suggested. “Because they were poor and wretched and wanted better lives? Because Communism sucked?”

  He shook his head at my sophisticated insight and said, “You do not know Russians. We have famous reputation for suffering. What is your word? ‘Stoic,’ yes? Read our literature… is about suffering. Study our history. Consider Russia’s most fabled leaders: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Lenin, Stalin. In what way all these people are alike? All are mass murderers. Does America have such homicidal icons? Your George Washington, your Abraham Lincoln, your FDR, they were famous killers?”

  I guessed he had a good point. “Okay, then how did Yeltsin do it?”

  “I never learned, but was connected as well. How else can Yeltsin outmaneuver everybody?”

  Until this point, he’d nearly had me convinced, nodding along nicely, following his logic, and so on. I fixed him with a stony look and said, “Look, we have a problem here. According to our intelligence, your boss, Yurichenko, approached Yeltsin near the beginning and struck a deal. Our people say Yurichenko helped him rise.”

  “Yes, was true. When Viktor sees him breaking through, we know something is badly wrong, so Viktor cultivates this relationship with Yeltsin. He insinuates himself inside. We know Yeltsin has powerful allies, but who? Viktor was not able to discover this answer.”

  “And what? When Yeltsin finally came to power, he rewarded your boss by making him head of the SVR?”

  “Was big irony, yes? Viktor was very trusted by Yeltsin… this was his reward for Viktor’s help.”

  “And you were giving all this to Morrison?”

  “Pieces, only. I was not knowing in the beginning what I was looking for.”

  “And why’d you go to Bill?”

  “This was last resort for me. When I could not find what was happening, I wanted to discuss American interpretations of these developments. Sometimes, those looking into a house see better than those inside, yes?”

  I had to take a moment to ponder all this. I had my pants on by then and that helped.

  I asked, “Did Yurichenko know you were meeting with Morrison?”

  He looked conflicted, as if this was something he was ashamed to admit. “No. Uh, Viktor would never permit this. We are very close, but Viktor is product of our old system and would consider it a most serious betrayal.”

  “Do you know who in the CIA got access to your reports, knew of your existence?”

  “Bill and Mary, of course. And only deputy directors of intelligence and operations were… uh, in the loop? This is correct?”

  “I think that’s correct, although Morrison told me a CIA psychiatrist was involved as well. He said it was a standard practice to keep you from going nuts on them.”

  “Then you see where I am having big problem?”

  I nodded, but as I mentioned before, spies are con men, and maybe the SVR had a bunch of Hollywood types who worked in the basement and cooked up these things. Actually, that was too wild-assed for even me to believe.

  He glanced at his watch. “I must now go back to office. I am telling everybody I am at lunch. I have appointments.”

  He reached out to shake my hand. I took it, and he promptly sensed my reservations about him, because he gave me a shy, reticent smile, a gesture that conveyed that this was painfully difficult for both of us.

  I recalled the description in Arbatov’s dossier, “magnetically charming,” and concluded that the CIA pegged him well. I was annoyed to find that I liked him, trusted him, and even wanted to believe what he told me.

  But enough to stake my life on him? Well, no. Nor did I see where his revelation fit in the picture. It explained why he approached Morrison in the first place, but where was the connection to Morrison’s arrest, or to ten years of treachery?

  More important, was there a connection to the ambush that morning? Regardless, the wise thing to do at that point was call the airline and book tickets. I made reservations for midnight so we could sneak out in the dead of night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Within moments after Alexi left, Katrina knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to accompany her to the embassy. I recommended that we first stroll around the block so I could tell her what Arbatov and I had discussed. The new and improved Sean Drummond would hold nothing back from the freshly restyled Miss Mazorski. Never mess with a woman who’d stick a man’s dick in a garbage disposal, that’s my motto. I did her a favor, though, and gave her the abbreviated version.

  Odd as this may sound, she didn’t seem all that interested. I had the impression she was going through the motions of politely hearing me out, while she was preoccupied with something else. Multitasking is a very useful and admirable skill, but it pisses me off when it’s happening to me.

  I said, “Am I detecting a listening problem here? And by the way, why are we going to the embassy?”

  “There’s someone we need to talk to… Morrison’s secretary.” She paused for a moment, then added, “When you were in the bathroom the other day, Mel mentioned to me that we might want to have a word with her.”

  “About what?”

  She began walking back toward the hotel. “He said she might have a few interesting insights.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, and it’s obviously too late to ask him.”

  “Right.”

  She walked a few more paces, then asked, “Do you notice how I’m sharing this with you?”

  “Yes, and it’s very commendable.”

  “And you just had another meeting with Arbatov and didn’t include me?”

  “Recall that I didn’t plan the meeting. He snuck into my room and woke me up.”

  “The circumstances don’t concern me.”

  “No, I don’t expect they do.”

  “You’ve put my life at risk.”

  “Yes, I know. I also said I’m sorry.”

  She rubbed her temples and was on the verge of saying something nasty, but settled for, “Don’t exclude me again.”

  “Right.” We arrived at the embassy twenty minutes later and went upstairs to the fourth floor, where the attache’s office is located. We walked into the reception area, and wouldn’t you know?

  Parked at a desk directly in front of the office door that read MILITARY ATTACHE sat one of the most perversely fetching women I ever laid eyes on. She had a face you wouldn’t necessarily call attractive. Sinful, decadent, cruel-these were the words that popped into my mind. She was what we men call an “oh God girl,” meaning the type who’d be digging your flesh out of her fingernails after the two of you did the big nasty. “Oh God” is what you say the second time she asks you out.

  She had jet black hair that hung past her waist, dark, s
ultry eyes surrounded by purple makeup, and a downward pout on her cherry red lips that let you know she demanded to be spoiled. Upon close inspection, it struck me that she looked remarkably like the woman who’d been performing the virtuoso with the triumvirate on my TV, although I’d gotten only the most fleeting glimpse of that woman. Really.

  Katrina awarded me a knowing look. No wonder Mel sicced us on Miss Nasty. Never underestimate a man who has a death wish on his former boss.

  Katrina marched right up to the desk and announced, “I’m Katrina Mazorski, and this is Major Drummond. We’re Morrison’s attorneys.”

  The woman studied us through a pair of wicked irises that seemed to bore right through your clothes and replied, “And how can I help you?”

  “You were his secretary?”

  “That’s right.”

  “We’re interviewing people who worked with him. We’d like to start with you.”

  She gave us a curiously indifferent look, like, What the hell, I’m bored, so why not?

  I said, “Do you have a conference room… somewhere we could speak in private?”

  For an answer she stood up and walked toward a door as if we should know we were expected to follow. I never took my eyes off her, since you never know where you might pick up your next vital clue; maybe hidden somewhere in her miniskirt, her dark net stockings, her high heels, or inside that top that seemed to be pasted to her skin.

  For her part, Katrina was rolling her eyes as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Truly, it took a stone-cold idiot to park this girl directly outside his office. Why hadn’t the stupid bastard stuck with a chubby little grandmother, like any responsible philanderer would do?

  We ended up inside a small, cramped office that appeared lived-in. A plaque on the wall from some Army training course drew my eye, and it was made out to Captain Melvin Torianski. Miss Nasty said, “He won’t care if we use it.”

  It’s always touching to see grief-stricken coworkers mourn the loss of a friend. Katrina slid over another chair, and the two of them eyed each other like a pair of hungry lionesses. I sat behind the desk, pulled out the tape recorder, and retrieved a yellow notepad from my briefcase, to sort of dramatize the atmosphere.